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61 comments on Oilwatch Monthly August 2009
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61 comments on Oilwatch Monthly August 2009
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Rembrandt,
Thanks for an exceptionally informative group of graphs. I encourage everyone to look at the other graphs in the Oilwatch Monthly PDF. There are some very nice graphs there as well.
From the Oil Watch Monthly PDF, I found it interesting to see how oil demand dropped off at different times around the world.
According to Jodi, oil demand for the US dropped off, starting about early 2008.
But demand in both Europe and Japan dropped off at least a year earlier--which is related to why at least some economists (such as Jeff Rubin) think that the recession started elsewhere than the US.
Demand in India continues to charge ahead:
Demand in China dropped sharply after the Olympics last year. It has rebounded, but not to the trajectory one would have expected based on prior demand growth.
Strictly speaking according to EIA data product supplied for the US peaked in Aug 2005. This coincides with a coincident peak in imports:
Operative refinery capacity continues to expand, however, one factor in why refineries are in such dire straits at the moment:
The decline seen in the 12 month MA shows up in this graph of gasoline supplied:
Does the JODI data account for biofuels? The US has compensated for decreasing imports with ethanol, both produced and imported; exactly how this is accounted for in the overall product supplied figures I'm not certain about. Part of the EIA definition of Finished Motor Gasoline is:
Doubt that would leave volume out of the figures provided, but thought I'd bring it up.
Comparisons between these graphs will be skewed without numeric analysis - just eyeballing can lead one astray as each is scaled differently. As I mentioned above, increased production of ethanol has allowed the US to reduce the need to import and refine crude oil. Ethanol cushioning the impact of the price spike is something I'd like to see analyzed further - including how much of a factor it is in various other nations' fuel supply.
Could the early falls in consumption have been triggered by something other than a latent recession or high prices? Like mandatory efficiency standards, carbon trading or green consumption trends? The reason I ask is that consumption seems to have been declining as early as 2004 in France, Germany, Italy and Japan. But others like the UK and Spain show a later decline beginning around 2006 which is more easily attributable to price rises.
Actually, the oil price run-up began much earlier than most people remember--2003 and onward, so the earlier drop does make sense. This is a graph Rune Likvern did, from this post.
Rembrandt, excellent analysis and presentation of the IEA, JODI and other data as usual. Thanks!
Chart 7 (World Production in BTUs) is an interesting chart showing that world liquids production currently contains less energy on a gross basis than in 2005.
A deeper analysis of this chart could be revealing.
In chart 7 the BTU content of "crude oil" is fixed at "a barrel of crude oil contains around 5.8 million British Thermal Units".
However, this assumes that the BTU content of "crude oil" has not been changing. The global average produced oil barrel is becoming lighter at one end with additional NGLs (containing less energy but requiring less to process) and heavier at the other end with oil sands and other heavy oil production (containing more energy but requiring more to process). Do these offset?
An interesting chart would be the average API gravity of the global average produced liquid barrel on a gross and net (net of processing losses) basis. This could be a level of precision which is not available in any dataset at the moment (maybe it is). It would be a great addition to your monthly analysis as a support to Chart 7.
@Buster Cagney (17 aug,4:14pm)
Thank you Buster I am always glad that this effort is a useful one. I did some work in the past on the change in sulfur content and API gravity of different crude blends across the globe. The data is not comprehensive enough though to state anything about the energy content as a consequence of this change (next to the indirect costs of drilling which is not taken into account in the BTU content). My conclusion based on several sources which did keep track of the average API gravity of global average produced liquid barrel (gross I think) was that the sulfur content and gravity in the coming 5-10 years will not change that much after the recent change to more heavier/sourer crudes, so your hypotheses that the different sources of new production offset eachother seems to be true. I don't have access to this data anymore (from PIRA/CERA) though and it is only updated once a year so this makes it difficult to add it into the oilwatch.
If you send me an email at contact @ peakoil.nl I can send you more information about this subject.
Ditto - random typo in the PDF version:
Page 9 - above graph of US Oil consumption:
'Oil consumption in the US decreased by 214,000 b/d from April to'
-- should be 21,400,right?
edit: Belay that - I'm such a dolt (I was looking at the decline from about 2005, which was about 21.4 MILLION b/d, rather than reading what was actually written. [ sigh] Sorry.)